The 2001 World Series: Diamondbacks, Yankees and a Country Watching
How the Arizona Diamondbacks beat the New York Yankees in seven games after September 11, from the delayed postseason to the ninth-inning rally in Game 7, with game scores and context.
On the night of November 4, 2001, Luis Gonzalez lofted a soft single over a drawn-in infield in Phoenix, and the Arizona Diamondbacks beat the New York Yankees 3-2 in Game 7 of the World Series. The pitcher on the wrong end of it was Mariano Rivera, who had saved 50 games that regular season and was as close to automatic in October as any closer the sport has seen. The winner was a franchise that had played its first game only four seasons earlier.
The series was already extraordinary before that final inning. It was played in the shadow of September 11, after the sport had stopped for a week, and it ran into November for the first time in history. Three games were played in New York, and two of them turned on two-out home runs in the ninth inning. The home team won every game. Arizona's two aces, Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling, shared the most valuable player award.
This article tells that story in order: the season that was interrupted, the two clubs, the road to the Series, each game, the ninth inning of Game 7 and what the result did and did not mean. All standings, series results and leaders come from the historical record; the game-by-game account relies on well-documented history, and where the record is thin, it is left thin.
A season stopped, and a calendar that stretched
The attacks of September 11, 2001, closed down the country, and Major League Baseball postponed its games. Play resumed on September 17, a Monday, with the schedule pushed back by a week. As a result, the regular season ended in the first days of October, the postseason began about a week later than planned, and the World Series, normally finished in October, ran into November. Game 4 started on October 31 and ended after midnight, and Games 5, 6 and 7 were played on November 1, 3 and 4.
The sport that came back was careful in tone. Ballparks held ceremonies for the victims and for the rescue workers. "God Bless America" became part of the seventh-inning stretch at Yankee Stadium and some other parks, and flags were everywhere. The games meant something different to the people watching. The Yankees, whose home city was the site of the attacks, became the team that millions of people outside New York found themselves rooting for or against with unusual intensity.
None of this changes what happened on the field. It does explain why the series is remembered not just as a sporting contest but as an event, and why the fans who watched it tend to remember where they were.
The two clubs
New York had won three straight World Series, in 1998, 1999 and 2000, and finished 2001 with a record of 95-65, first in the American League East. The team's manager was Joe Torre. Rivera led the American League in saves with 50 and Roger Clemens won the American League Cy Young Award. The club had a veteran core and a postseason pedigree that few teams have ever matched.
Arizona was a National League West champion at 92-70, two games ahead of the Giants. The Diamondbacks began play in 1998 and built a team around veterans. The manager, Bob Brenly, was in his first season at the helm. The pitching staff was the center of the roster. Randy Johnson won the National League Cy Young Award, led the league in strikeouts with 372 and posted a 2.49 ERA, the best in the league. Curt Schilling won 22 games, tied for the most in the National League, and struck out 293 batters, second to Johnson. In the lineup, Luis Gonzalez hit 57 home runs and drove in 142 runs, one of the most unlikely power seasons of the year given that he was not a historic slugger before it.
The comparison tells you why the series was close. The Yankees had the stronger record and the October reputation. Arizona had the two best starting pitchers in the National League and a lineup that could do damage.
The road to the Series
New York's path was harder than its seed suggested. In the American League Division Series the Yankees beat the Oakland Athletics three games to two, a series famous for the Yankees losing the first two games and winning the next three. They then beat the Seattle Mariners 4-1 in the American League Championship Series. Seattle had won 116 games in the regular season, a total that is among the highest in the sport's history, and still lost in five.
Arizona beat the St. Louis Cardinals 3-2 in the division series, a five-game struggle against a team that had won 93 games, and the Atlanta Braves 4-1 in the National League Championship Series. The Braves had swept Houston in the opening round. Arizona therefore reached the World Series after two five-game series, with its two aces pitching the biggest games.
The rest of the 2001 season, for context
The Series was the climax of a season that produced plenty of other history. Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs for the Giants, and Sammy Sosa drove in 160 runs for the Cubs. Ichiro Suzuki arrived from Japan and won both the American League Rookie of the Year award and the Most Valuable Player award, leading the majors with 242 hits and winning the batting title at .350. Albert Pujols was the National League Rookie of the Year. The Mariners' 116-46 record was the best in the American League, and the Athletics won 102 games and still finished second in their division.
Those numbers also set the league's baseline. The 30 major-league clubs scored an average of 4.78 runs per team-game in 2001, and they hit 1.12 home runs per team-game, so the low-scoring World Series was an outlier even within its own year. The Yankees scored 14 runs in the seven games, an average of two a game. To see how run totals move from year to year, compare the standings and leaders for any season on the site's standings and leaders pages.
Games 1 and 2: Arizona's aces in Phoenix
The first two games were played in Phoenix, and they were not close.
Schilling started Game 1 and Arizona won 9-1. Johnson started Game 2 and pitched a shutout, and Arizona won 4-0. The Yankees, who were accustomed to winning close games late, had scored one run in two games. Their lineup had been shut down by the two best pitchers in the National League, and the Yankees were headed home trailing two games to none.
Games 3, 4 and 5: New York answers
The series moved to Yankee Stadium, and the atmosphere was unlike anything the park had seen. President George W. Bush threw the ceremonial first pitch before Game 3, a moment that has remained one of the most vivid images of that fall. The Yankees won that game 2-1, with Clemens pitching and Rivera closing it out.
Game 4 was played on October 31. Arizona led 3-1 into the bottom of the ninth, with its closer, Byung-Hyun Kim, on the mound. With two outs, Tino Martinez hit a two-run home run to tie the game at 3-3. The game went to extra innings, and just after midnight, in the tenth, Derek Jeter hit a home run that ended it 4-3. The date had changed to November 1, and the home run is the reason people still call him Mr. November.
Game 5 followed the next night with almost the same script. Arizona led 2-0 going into the bottom of the ninth. With two outs, Scott Brosius hit a two-run home run to tie the game at 2-2. The game went 12 innings, and the Yankees won it 3-2. Two ninth-inning, two-out home runs in two nights, each off Kim, gave New York a 3-2 lead in the series with the final two games to be played in Arizona.
For anyone who wants to understand the positions that Martinez and Brosius played, how to play first base and third base explains what the corner infielders are asked to do.
Game 6: the blowout
The Yankees needed one win. They did not get it in Game 6. Johnson started for Arizona, and the Diamondbacks beat New York 15-2. The score is the most lopsided of the series, and it forced a seventh game.
In a series with two ninth-inning comebacks, an extra-inning walk-off and a presidential first pitch, the biggest score came in the one game that was never in doubt. Johnson started it, which makes his appearance in relief the next night more remarkable.
Game 7: the ninth inning
The final game was played on November 4, with Schilling on the mound for Arizona on three days of rest. The game was tight throughout. In the eighth inning, Alfonso Soriano hit a home run that put New York ahead 2-1. Johnson, who had started Game 6 the night before, came out of the bullpen to keep it there. New York turned to Rivera in the bottom of the eighth, and he retired the side. Then he went back out for the ninth.
What followed is one of the most analyzed innings in the sport's history. Mark Grace led off with a single. Damian Miller bunted, Rivera threw wildly to second base, and the Diamondbacks had runners on first and second with no outs. Jay Bell bunted into a force out at third. Tony Womack doubled to tie the game 2-2. Craig Counsell was hit by a pitch to load the bases. Then Gonzalez came up with the infield drawn in to protect against the run at the plate, and he hit a bloop single over Jeter that was just out of reach. The winning run scored. The game was over, and so was the series.
The play-by-play deserves two comments. First, the choice to play the infield in was a reasonable strategy that came back to bite: a drawn-in infield turns a medium-depth pop into a hit. Second, the sequence began with a mistake of a kind that Rivera rarely made. The wild throw on the bunt put a runner in scoring position, and a play that should have produced an out produced none. Gonzalez's hit was not hard, and the series ended on a ball that fell in short.
Johnson was credited with the win, his third of the series. He and Schilling shared the Most Valuable Player award.
The seven games in a table
| Game | Date | Site | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | October 27 | Phoenix | Arizona 9, New York 1 |
| 2 | October 28 | Phoenix | Arizona 4, New York 0 |
| 3 | October 30 | New York | New York 2, Arizona 1 |
| 4 | October 31 | New York | New York 4, Arizona 3 (10 innings) |
| 5 | November 1 | New York | New York 3, Arizona 2 (12 innings) |
| 6 | November 3 | Phoenix | Arizona 15, New York 2 |
| 7 | November 4 | Phoenix | Arizona 3, New York 2 |
Adding the scores gives Arizona 37 runs and New York 14, even though the Yankees won three of the seven games. The home team won all seven games, a pattern that also occurred in the 1991 World Series between the Twins and Braves. The runs show how the games split: Arizona's wins were lopsided, and New York's were decided by a single run or in extra innings.
What decided it
Starting pitching decided it. Johnson and Schilling started five of the seven games and Johnson appeared in a sixth, and between them they won all four of Arizona's victories.
New York's lineup was not the team that had won three straight titles. The Yankees scored 14 runs in seven games. The scoring they did manage came in the late innings, and their wins were of the dramatic kind: a Rivera save, two tying home runs, an extra-inning walk-off. That is a thin way to win four games out of seven, and they won three. The sport's variance does the rest.
The choice that drew the most second-guessing came in Games 4 and 5, when Arizona used Kim in the ninth inning on consecutive nights with a lead each time. It was a defensible decision by the conventions of the day, and the outcome made it look worse. Closers are rarely removed from a save situation because of a bad night before, and managers who do so are often criticized when it fails.
What it meant
For Arizona, the title came in the club's fourth season, the fastest for any expansion franchise in the sport's history up to that point. For New York, it was the end of a run that had seemed unending. The Yankees would reach the World Series again in 2003 and win it in 2009, but the run of three straight titles was over.
For the sport, the series did something harder to measure. It gave a stunned country a shared event at a moment when sports mattered less than anything else and, somehow, a bit more than usual. Fans who were not baseball fans watched. Fans who were baseball fans remember it as one of the best series they ever saw. Both statements can be true. If you want to compare it with other seventh games, the 2004 Red Sox, the 2016 Cubs and the 1988 Dodgers with Kirk Gibson are the natural companions, and the 1986 Mets and Red Sox belong on the same shelf for drama.
Common questions
Who won the 2001 World Series? The Arizona Diamondbacks beat the New York Yankees four games to three.
Why was the 2001 World Series played in November? Major League Baseball postponed games after the attacks of September 11 and resumed on September 17, which pushed the schedule back about a week. The series was the first to run into November.
Who was the Most Valuable Player? Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling shared it.
How did Game 7 end? Arizona trailed 2-1 going into the bottom of the ninth. It tied the game against Mariano Rivera and won it on a single by Luis Gonzalez, 3-2.
Did the home team win every game? Yes. Arizona won the four games in Phoenix and New York won the three games in New York.
Where to go next
To see how a series like this fits into the October format, read how the MLB postseason works. For the other great sevenths, start with the 2004 Red Sox. To look at that season's standings and leaders, use the standings and leaders pages.